Agreeing with Kurt and ULTRAGOTHA: The supporting membership cost isn’t a Hugo voting fee. Since my first Worldcon, I’ve been a supporting member of most Worldcons that I’ve been unable to attend, and I don’t think I bothered to cast a Hugo vote in any of those years. I bought supporting memberships to support the Worldcon, and remain a member of WSFS, and sometimes to be able to vote in site selection.

I think you’re misreading that, Mark. Washington State has 1829 members, which is probably due to the convention being in Spokane. DC has 51 members listed. Bear in mind, though, a lot of people who might want to vote for DC based on proximity could be in Maryland (257) or Virginia (262), or even further afield than that; it’s not all that hard to get to DC from a lot of eastern states.

Finland has 222 members, which is very likely more than usual due to site selection.

@ Mark – And two Portlands and enough Springfields to choke a horse. I once did a teacher’s conference in Springfield, Illinois and I got off the plane–I hadn’t booked the flights–and I had fully expected to be in Ohio because SPRINGFIELD and I went in this grey panic that I had somehow showed up at the wrong place.

That whole trip was cursed. Nice people, but utterly cursed. That was the weekend Chicago’s air traffic control caught fire so I was stuck for two extra days, and that was also the time where they forgot my slot on the readings at the big banquet dinner, remembered at the last minute, and put me on after what was supposed to be the closing act. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I got to read after Lemony Snicket, and if there is a deeper hell for a children’s book author, I do not know of it.

(Worst of all, because he doesn’t appear under the pen name exactly, I didn’t know who it was until he started reading, and then the slow dawning horror of the act I had to follow crashed over me and it was just not a good weekend.)

There are a lot more than 2 Portlands –I think I counted eleven at one point, plus one “Portland Junction”. Of course, since I live in the largest (which was almost named “Boston”, had the coin toss come up differently), I tend to forget about the others.

There are about 30 Springfields (I grew up in one of them) in the US–and then, of course, there’s Vancouver WA (where I work), which is not the same as the newer city of Vancouver, British Columbia.

A UK variant is that there are a lot of Newports. Now, having lots of new ports makes a lot of sense, but for some reason the inhabitants of the various Newports seem unaware that they are not the only one, so when you ask “which Newport” you get an indignant reply of “why, is there there more than one?”

When I traveled to Washington D.C. as a child I quickly learned that when people asked me where I was from, I had to say “Seattle” and not “Washington” because if I said “Washington” people said, “Oh, you’re a local?”

The irony is that Washington State was going to be named Columbia, but it was feared it would be confused with the District of Columbia. D’oh!